Championing the French Language

Caroline Weber is an associate professor of French literature at Barnard College and Columbia University.

Updated June 6, 2011, 7:40 PM

In limiting “Facebook” and “Twitter” mentions from TV broadcasting in France, the Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel has construed these words as “clandestine advertisements” for the social media companies they designate. But the ruling can be read as a form of covert publicity — on behalf of the French language itself, a medium whose soi disant primacy has figured prominently in Gallic identity politics for more than half a millennium.

The Académie Française has expressed ambivalence about acknowledging the legitimacy of Anglo-American terms like 'week-end.'

In 1539, the Renaissance sovereign François I deemed French the official language of his kingdom, thereby dealing a death blow to the entrenched usage of Latin as the lingua franca of juridical and cultural affairs. Having emerged out of Latin as a relatively flexible, informal vernacular tongue, French in those days boasted scant standardization in its grammar, vocabulary and orthography. To address this issue, in 1635, Cardinal Richelieu founded the Académie Française, an elite cultural institution whose mission was, and remains, “to codify [fixer] the French language, to give it rules, to make it pure and comprehensible by everyone.” To this end, the Académie was, and remains, charged with publishing a regularly updated dictionary, whose additions and “suppressions” represent the authoritative statement on the French lexicon.

As is well known, the Académie today has expressed ambivalence about, even disgust at, acknowledging the legitimacy of Anglo-American terms like “week-end,” notwithstanding their near-universal adoption in the country’s spoken patois. However, the most recent version of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, begun in 1982, has only gotten as far as volume 36, “prométhéen à quadrivium.” So the official verdict on “week-end” has yet to be handed down; ditto such techno-intensive Anglicisms as “site-web.”

The paradox of such provincial hand-wringing is that it actually undermines a historical legacy of the French language that is every bit as notable as its “purity.” Thanks in part to the early, homogenizing efforts of Richelieu’s Académie, French emerged in the eighteenth century as the international language par excellence, adopted by intellectuals, politicians and scholars throughout the Western world.

It served as common currency in the spheres of diplomacy, art, science, and philosophy, among men and women who viewed themselves as members of a free-thinking, radically transnational “Republic of Letters.” These individuals’ lively and far-reaching exchanges—in which they batted about ideas that would, by the century’s end, have literally revolutionary ramifications in America and France—have recently been reconstructed online in Stanford University’s multimedia project, “Mapping the Republic of Letters.”

Dan Edelstein, one of the project’s creators, pointed out that these exchanges were themselves the most influential “social media” of their era, “cut[ting] across national, religious, and linguistic borders” to reshape the very foundations of geopolitics and culture. Viewed in this light, mentions of “Facebook” and “Twitter” in fact advertise the importance of what was — for one brief, shining moment in European history — a supremely French value: the triumph of universally accessible ideas over restrictively parochial expression.